Morality, legality and gender violence in Angel

This article explores the dynamics of morality, legality and gendered violence represented in one episode of the television series Angel. In this episode, simply titled 'Billy', a young man is hunted down by Angel, who is both a private detective and a vampire with a soul, to prevent him from unleashing 'primordial misogyny' in the men he touches. I argue that the dominant themes of the episode are gender, morality and legality. Whereas the latter are represented as contextually specific, the performances of gender adhere to a binary logic in keeping with modernist notions of the subject. I outline the theory of gender/ed violence that underpins my analysis, before investigating signifiers of legality and morality, drawing on wider themes from the series. I illustrate that legality and morality may be represented as unstable, but this radical potential is undermined by the representation of masculinised violence as inherently tied to material bodies. I conclude that the organisation of the episode - and of the series overall - around the notion that 'if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do' (Angel 2.16) is undermined through the representations of gender and gendered violence that are central themes in this performance.